Creatures of the Air
University of Chicago Press (Verlag)
978-0-226-82613-4 (ISBN)
Often experienced as universal and incorporeal, music seems an innocent art form. The air, the very medium by which music constitutes itself, shares with music a claim to invisibility. In Creatures of the Air, J. Q. Davies interrogates these claims, tracing the history of music’s elemental media system in nineteenth-century Atlantic worlds. He posits that air is a poetic domain, and music is an art of that domain.
From West Central African ngombi harps to the European J. S. Bach revival, music expressed elemental truths in the nineteenth century. Creatures of the Air tells these truths through stories about suffocation and breathing, architecture and environmental design, climate strife, and racial turmoil. Contributing to elemental media studies, the energy humanities, and colonial histories, Davies shows how music, no longer just an innocent luxury, is implicated in the struggle for control over air as a precious natural resource. What emerges is a complex political ecology of the global nineteenth century and beyond.
J. Q. Davies is professor of music at the University of California, Berkeley. With Nicholas Mathew, he is the coeditor of the New Material Histories of Music series at the University of Chicago Press. He is the author of Romantic Anatomies of Performance and coeditor, with Ellen Lockhart, of Sound Knowledge: Music and Science in London, 1789–1851.
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Chapter 1 White “Genius”: Ngango, Gabon Estuary, 1817
Chapter 2 A Falcon under Glass: Paris, France, 1838
Chapter 3 Moral Atmospherics in Elijah: Black Country, Britain, 1846–1860
Chapter 4 Black Musics Control: Santa Maria de Belém do Grão-Pará, Brazil, 1871
Chapter 5 A Spectral Image of Breath: New York, United States, 1901
Chapter 6 Albert Schweitzer’s Equatorial Piano: Lambaréné, Gabon, 1913
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
| Erscheinungsdatum | 12.08.2023 |
|---|---|
| Reihe/Serie | New Material Histories of Music |
| Zusatzinfo | 44 halftones |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 152 x 229 mm |
| Gewicht | 540 g |
| Themenwelt | Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Musik ► Musiktheorie / Musiklehre |
| ISBN-10 | 0-226-82613-9 / 0226826139 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0-226-82613-4 / 9780226826134 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
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